Last October, when billionaire Elon Musk acquired social media powerhouse Twitter, we took note of the backlash among everyone from company employees to progressive users like Whoopi Goldberg, and we advised taking a deep breath.

We urged our readers to give Musk some credit for setting out to minimise censorship and create a place where a divided America could come together for open conversation. Don’t rush to judgment, we counselled. Give the world’s richest man a reasonable timetable to figure out a plan for his new acquisition.

Well, it’s August and a plan has yet to emerge fully formed from the wreckage that followed the US$44bil deal. The business magnate has gutted the company, culminating in last month’s decision to scrap its valuable brand name and familiar bird logo and instead rename it X. That’s not a typo: X. On the face of it, that’s the worst decision since one of this newspaper’s former owners came up with the guttural Tronc.

A crazy call? Maybe, but it’s still too early to declare that the man behind X doesn’t know his X’s from his O’s.

While Musk has given his critics tons of ammunition to blast him with, we see signs that he’s following the vision that prompted the acquisition in the first place. Even the seemingly bonkers decision to rename the company X fits with a long-standing idea to create a new kind of online platform that rolls many functions into one, and potentially challenges LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and its latest direct competitor, Meta’s Threads.

So, take another deep breath and consider that even a journey marred by detours, roadblocks and wrong turns can still end at the planned destination, especially when it draws funding from the deepest pockets on the planet.

Nothing about Twitter’s acquisition has gone smoothly since April 2022, when Musk announced his buyout offer, along with his intentions to introduce new features, make the algorithms open source and promote free speech. The deal almost fell apart over the prevalence of computerized “spambots” that automatically spread spam across the platform, but it finally closed just before Halloween.

In short order, Musk took over as CEO and - no surprise given that the company had been losing money - he proceeded to oust Twitter executives, shutter offices and abruptly cut ties with many of the company’s employees and contractors. The communications team went dark, leaving Twitter to crassly respond to media inquiries with an emoji of feces, and many of those responsible for content moderation left or were fired.

After about a month, Musk began unbanning banned accounts, opening the platform to hate speech while at the same time selectively blocking individuals who evidently got under his thin skin, including the accounts of multiple journalists and an account that used public information to track his private jet.

Fact-checkers ranging from the BBC to the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found evidence of an increase in racial slurs and misinformation after Musk took over, findings the billionaire has aggressively contested.

On July 31, in the name of “protecting the public’s right to free expression,” X filed suit against the anti-hate nonprofit, accusing it of making false claims and encouraging advertisers to avoid the site, which reportedly has experienced a free fall in ad revenues since last year. X maintains that “more than 99.99% of post impressions are healthy.”

Suing an anti-hate group might have been a new low for X, were it not for a previous contender. One of the most misguided episodes of Musk’s tenure has been his handling of the company’s program using colour-coded checkmarks to sort real accounts from spambots, parody accounts and other fakes.

Rather than maintaining the checkmarks simply to help users verify another account’s identity and avoid malicious confusion, X conflated it with a revenue-raising scheme, selling subscriptions to the all-clear “blue check” markers. X then went on to remove or change verification status of some notable users while granting it to others who didn’t want it.

If Musk’s tenure at X seems like a fiasco so far, yes, we noticed that too. But we also see the potential for creating a new “everything app” that lives up to the X-brand vision that Musk has toyed with for two decades. Musk has said that he envisions a service that rolls many of the most popular online functions into one “great interface” and supports the content creators who turn ideas into reality.

The CEO he brought in to replace himself at X earlier this year, Linda Yaccarino, recently pledged that the company will usher in “a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” powered by artificial intelligence and connecting people in “ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

Those buzzy promises don’t amount to much right now. But Musk is the man who made Tesla a leading player in electric vehicles, and whose previous flirtations with “X” turned into gold. There was the X.com bank that merged with another company to become PayPal, and SpaceX, which dominates rocket launches, and most recently, xAI, an artificial intelligence startup worth watching.

The X factor behind the company formerly known as Twitter is Musk himself, and it’s too soon to X him out.

 - TNS